Obama, Kim Jong-Un in 'Twitter war'

Posted By
Andrea Shea King
On
05/06/2013 @ 11:16 am
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Diversions,Front Page,Politics,U.S. |
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The Daily Rash

A hilarious satire site recently “reported” about a Twitter dialog between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un and President Barack Obama in which the young dictator taunted Obama with one disparaging tweet after another.

With tongue embedded in cheek, The Daily Rash reported, “After several weeks of nuclear threats from the young dictator, few were surprised that he would attempt to provoke the president with denigrating remarks on the Internet’s popular social network.”

Writer Matt Labash attended the recent five-day South by Southwest Interactive Festival, or SXSW (in Twitter-speak), held annually as part of a larger 11-day SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, and made the claim that Western Civilization is declining, 140 characters at a time.

No fan of Twitter, Labash wrote a piece better suited for a lengthy NPR Fresh Aire-type segment about the social media phenom and how it has “infiltrated itself into every crevice of society.”

In far more than 140 characters, Labash listed several examples of how “pathological the Twitterfication of the world” has become: “A Houston hospital felt it necessary to live tweet a brain surgery. A second-grade class in Buffalo corrected the misspelled tweets of NFL players as a grammar exercise. A Washington, D.C., hotel promised a ‘dedicated social media butler’ as part of its $47,000 Obama inaugural package, to chronicle the experience ‘so your friends and family can follow your adventures on Twitter.'”

This important report looks at 18 companies to determine if – among other things – they require a warrant, tell you there’s been a government request for your info, publish transparency reports and fight for users’ privacy rights both in court and in Congress: “In this annual report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation examined the policies of major Internet companies – including ISPs, email providers, cloud storage providers, location-based services, blogging platforms and social networking sites – to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data. The purpose of this report is to incentivize companies to be transparent about how data flows to the government and encourage them to take a stand for user privacy whenever it is possible to do so.”

If you’re at all interested in knowing who’s got your back, this is the report you must read.

Wink! Wink!

OK, first of all, do you know what Google Glass is?

CNet explains: “Google Glass is Google on your face.” Eyeglass-type frames “ship with the ability to take the very most recent communications from your smart phone or Google accounts and show them to you in a head-up display. They take phone calls. They send texts, take photos and video, and show maps. They deliver search results. If you’ve played with Google Now, the Glass interface is strikingly similar.

“This product is often incorrectly referred to as ‘Google Glasses’ with good reason,” CNet explains. “But it’s really more of a lensless eyeglasses frame, with a mobile computing device built into the stem that sits on your right ear. That right arm wraps around to a small transparent display that sits above your right eye. Imagine if a wearable side-mounted camera grew a glasses-frame construct, and that’s Glass. ”

Capabilities are still being developed. The next Google Glass owner who winks at you may actually be taking your picture, according to a CNet report that explains how the high-tech titanium wearable computer snaps photos with just the wink of an eye.

The feature is called Winky, and “can even be used to snap a photo when the screen is turned off. As a result, Winky eliminates the need to issue a voice command or tap a button to take a picture.”

Does this seem a little creepy to you? Or is it just another marvel of technology?